Tapping Hitler's Generals

MEYER (reporting a conversation with EBERDING): I said: ‘If the

Bolshevists succeed in conquering GERMANY, then it means the extinction of our people.’ He replied: ‘That’s nonsense! We have lost so many wars; we lost in 1918, we lost against NAPOLEON and so on.’ ULLERSPERGER: There’s no comparison at all!

MEYER: I said: ‘What you are saying is senseless. That was an alteration in system, but nothing more than that. If Bolshevism triumphs today, then it will be a question of the biological annihilation of our people.’ He can’t see that.

ULLERSPERGER: Obviously, because only a convinced National Socialist can understand that.

MEYER: Afterwards he said: ‘I can’t refute what you told me; I don’t know where you learnt it–’ The fact is, there’s one thing I must say. Mistrust of our Generals is in my opinion, and I realise it more and more–in some ways by no means entirely groundless, because they have not accepted National Socialism as a religion, as we have, but only as a system of government obtaining for the moment.

ULLERSPERGER: Yes, of course.

MEYER: For instance, he said to me: ‘It is the third system which I have experienced.’ That’s wrong, a man can only give himself once; I have breathed in National Socialism as a religion, as my life, no matter whether it is called National Socialism or has some other designation. I have realised that that is the only right life for our people, that otherwise our culture would go to the devil. This National Socialism stands for the conditions of life and for the things which are essential for our people for the preservation of our race, our people and our culture. He said: ‘What do you mean by culture?’

Document 66

CSDIC (UK), GRGG 267

Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 2–3 Mar. 45 [TNA, WO 208/4177]

CHOLTITZ: ‘We shall not go under!’ But you know,any decent nation may lose a war, that means that it has been led in a stupid manner or has been put in a totally crazy political situation; they can’t, however, lose the war if they fight on to the end honourably. That is what the enemy is afraid of!

ELFELDT: If the Allies had gone on to BERLIN in one fell swoop after NORMANDY–

CHOLTITZ: Our spirit would have been broken!

ELFELDT: Yes. Actually the military fame of the German Army cannot be destroyed, whatever defeats they may yet suffer, this nation can only go down with honour.

CHOLTITZ: Lose the war with honour. It will never go under!

BRUHN: Now that the bombs are raining down the simple worker, the ordinary ‘Regierungsrat’, the ‘Major’, the German housewife etc. take it as the proof of what HITLER and GOEBBELS have always said: i.e. That you with devilish baseness want to destroy everything German, no matter whether woman or child. It’s a lie and a complete distortion of the facts.

BAO: Do you think this hatred will continue after the war when we’re occupying Germany?

BRUHN: No, we must see to that; it will be a difficult task. I don’t think so, although there is a danger. It’ll have to be tackled with great strictness but also with a great deal of understanding for this tortured people. You can’t hang everyone; that is impossible as you’d be sowing the seeds of further massacres. The younger generation will have to be watched very carefully and we’ll have to take a firm stand with them. All that is well and good once we have fuel and the possibility of providing sufficient food for the population, so that they won’t steal, murder and pillage and take everything they find.

CHOLTITZ: We no longer know the meaning of the word ‘national’. There’s no mention at all of it being a matter of honour. It has become a matter of plunder! These damned criminals!

RAMCKE: I only know that stealing went on in the RHINELAND in 1922.[145]

CHOLTITZ: You don’t know anything at all about it: you’ve merely read that in the ‘Völkischer Beobachter’. How do you know about it?

RAMCKE: Leutnant HAMM lived in the RUHR district. One night there came a knock at the door and his parents were told that they had to clear the house, it was requisitioned. Leutnant HAMM arrived home on return from ENGLAND and wanted to go into his house; a French sentry stood in front of it. All the silver was missing.

CHOLTITZ: Excuse me, but haven’t you yourself taken silver? Isn’t that also requisitioned privately owned silver?

RAMCKE: No!

CHOLTITZ: What is it then?

RAMCKE: I got it from a naval officers’ mess.

CHOLTITZ: But that’s private property, that has been pinched too!

RAMCKE (continues his story): The upholstery was slashed open, the pictures had been taken away or slashed and destroyed. There was nothing left in the whole house which could be used. And that happened not to one, but to 100,000 families all over the French-occupied RHINELAND.[146]